The Tortoise and the Hare is a popular fairy tale that’s survived for centuries. Everyone’s got a different angle on it, but the plot is pretty simple: The Hare is overconfident and sleeps off a race while the Tortoise wins by hard work. So many themes can come from this: If you snooze, you lose, or, slow steady work wins the race, or, even further, grunt work wins over innate talent. Whatever your interpretation, the Tortoise and the Hare is a simple story to interpret. But if you look more closely, you’ll find that beauty and ugliness is a plot device that cleverly hides the notion of hard work versus distraction.
Continue reading ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ – Medieval Notions of Beauty and Laziness